Here is a list of  providers to choose from:

Top 20 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Web Sites

Want to see Social Bookmarking in action? Check out this brief overview video produced by Commoncraft:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Here is link a list of bookmarks  I have started of  organizations and resources for learners in the School of Education:

http://delicious.com/edresources

Any questions on Social Bookmarking? Ask a Librarian

Robin

I have been avoiding setting up a Twitter account, but decided it was time to take a look at how it might be useful to me in a professional capacity. It turns out they “tweet” many useful pieces of information, such as announcements of their upcoming webinars for learning how to use various functions and features of RefWorks, as well as links to interesting articles and related information.

They post the same information on their Facebook account as status updates so you don’t have to do both if you prefer one application over the other. If you’re interested in checking out what RefWorks is up to in the Social Networking realm, then check out this website: Can’t Get Enough of RefWorks?

-Sommer

Or the biggest name in microblogging today: Twitter?

Twitter lets you quickly send out a short message of 140 characters, called a tweet.  Then anyone who is signed up to receive your tweets gets to read it.  You can create a network of friends who all watch each others’ tweets, or you can join the multitude following the moment-by-moment details of the lives of the famous.

Twitter may have started as a fast way for people to quickly update all their friends at once, but it has quickly moved beyond that.  With 6 million users, a recent Business Week article looks at some of the possibilities for businesses who want to tap that market.

Politicians have also joined the Twitter craze.  The Obama campaign ran its own Twitter stream, and the president got to be the subject (or not) of tweets when other pols used Twitter to comment during his speech.

Not sure how this will ever apply to your academic or professional life?  Think again.  Twitter is making inroads at professional and academic conferences, with audience members pouring out streams of tweets about what’s going on.   The ALA Annual Conference, where thousands of librarians meet to discuss things like Twitter,  isn’t even happening until July, and it’s already got quite a long list of tweets.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t Twitter.   If you read my blog posts, you’ll know that I can’t contain myself to only 140 characters.  And, like many others who work in academia, I have a real soft spot for long, analytical discussions with footnotes.  Not exactly tweet material.

Still, even if you don’t Twitter yourself, you may need to be aware of it in future.  If this trend really catches on,  you may be in the dark without it.

In the meantime, you can revel in your luddite attitude while watching this funny YouTube video from Current.

- Erin

The following ProQuest databases now include this feature:

• ABI/INFORM Global
• Psychology Journals
• ProQuest Education Journals
• ProQuest Medical Library
• Dissertations & Theses Full Text

“Cited reference searching and bibliography mining are advanced research techniques that help you look both backwards and forwards in time to discover how an individual article or book relates to the development of a discipline. It can help you trace ideas back to their source, discover seminal works, complete a literature review, watch concepts mature over time, and analyze the importance of a single article in a discipline.” (Definition from the Bibliography Mining and Cited Reference Searching guide.)

Keep in mind that like other databases that include convenient bibliography mining and cited reference searching links, ProQuest only has links to articles and dissertations that are indexed in the ProQuest databases.

Below is a screen shot showing how the links appear in your results. Be sure to sort your results by Relevance instead of Date, as the more recently published articles are less likely to have been cited by anyone. Writing, research, and waiting for publication takes time!

-Sommer

The next time you hear about something new and you think ….what? Check out a Commoncraft Show.

These are three to four minutes videos that are both informative and have a humorous touch. The subtitle says it all …. “In Plain English”

Robin

What is a meme? If you look it up in the library’s Credo Reference database, you’ll see the following definition:

A contagious unit of information (such as an idea, slogan, or fashion) that replicates through communication networks; a successful meme has bait (it promises something) and a hook (it urges people to pass it on to others).

meme. (2003). In Webster’s New World™ Computer Dictionary. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Retrieved March 18, 2009, from http://www.credoreference.com.library.capella.edu/entry/3484787/.

Memes are widespread on the internet. You’ve probably seen several of them without realizing that’s what they are. Someone posts a video to YouTube and within a few weeks, everyone you know has seen (and probably laughed at or been terrified) it. But have you ever wondered how they got started? How they evolved?

Or, have you ever seen something on the internet that seems like it’s an inside joke that you just aren’t a party to? Then it could be a meme. And memes are showing up everywhere – they simultaneously make people laugh AND show others how “hip” you are. One recent example is from Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who altered a common internet meme to be the title of a blog post on the economy: All Your Downside Are Belong To Us.

So how would you find out what that title actually means? One easy way is to let Rocketboom do it for you. They are an internet culture blog that creates “know your meme” videos to help the clueless among us become more internet savvy. It’s a one stop shop for finding out the history behind:

• LolCats
• The Rick Roll
• Fail
• Boom goes the Dynamite
• Disaster Girl
• many others

So, if reading scholarly literature isn’t exactly upping your street cred with the under 20 crowd, perhaps boning up on a few internet memes is just what you need to recuperate from your quarter and look cool at parties.

It may not be an academic endeavor, but this librarian is labeling it information literacy. (Knowing how information travels in the 21st century is central to being an information literate person . . . ) And we librarians are certainly not above a few internet memes ourselves!

- Erin

That may have been true a few years ago, when just about all blogs were personal or covered popular interest topics.  In recent years, however, blogging has become more popular with academics.  It’s still not equivalent to peer review (and may never be), but it is the digital equivalent of those 5 minute conversations that take place between experts who meet in a university hallway or in the back row of a presentation at a conference.

And those types of conversations can be invaluable if you want to keep up with what others in the field are thinking and doing.

As budding experts in your field, blogging may be a great way to start tossing about your own ideas.  See this list of reasons academics should blog from Hugh McGuire’s blog.  It might just inspire you to find or write your own academic blog.

- Erin

Well, this article let me know that:
“YouTube does not have a single page from which all the university channels can be accessed.”

Instead, here are some sample individual channels:

• Vanderbilt University
• University of California Berkeley
• University of Southern California
• University of California Television
• Duke University
• Washington University
• Purdue University
• Auburn University
• MIT

I did discover one way to search for University channel lectures directly, though:

1. Go to www.youtube.com.
2. Click Channels tab.
3. Search for a topic, combined with the word “university.” E. g.: “university anatomy.”
4. Click Channels link below the search box.

So if you have a specific research interest or just want to download some high-intellect shows for your morning bus commute, this should help you get started.

Articles:

• Lens on the Future: Open Source Learning
• Opening Up Itunes U

– Erika

Google Docs is free and you just need to register to get a user name and password.

It can help you: 

1. Create documents, forms, spreadsheets and presentations. It will also alsow you to access them from any location with access to the Web.
2. Upload and store documents that you have already created.
3. Collaborate and edit documents with others.
4. Create a permanent link to your document, spreadsheet or presenation and “publish” it to share with others.

Sound “neat” – I thought so.

In addition to being a librarian,  I am also a doctoral student. One way I use Google Docs is as a place to back up and retrive documents related to my dissertation. It is of course not the only place I back up my dissertation, but it is one option.

I also recently colloaborated on a presenation for a  conference with a colleague and we were able to collaborate on the document using Google Docs and then send a link of the presentation to conference attendees. It was much nicer than emailing the document back and forth. We were also were able to revert back to previous versions of the document, if the changes one of us made did not work.

Google Docs is one of the tools we cover in our presenation Enhancing Library Research Skills with New Technologies at Colloquium. Like the rest of our colloquium presentations it is on our Guides & Tutorials  page (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page).

You could also check out this short YouTube Video:

Google Docs in Plain English 

If you have question about using Google Docs or other Google Tools, such as Google Reader, Google Scholar or Google Books we may be able to help in the Library.

If you check out Google Docs, let me know what you think!

Robin

We knew there’d be a lot of questions about RefWorks, so we had a librarian devoted just to RefWorks come with us to Dallas.  We also talked about RefWorks in all the Library and Writing Center sessions.  RefWorks came up in most conversations we had with learners over the course of the colloquium.

And what is the overall impression learners have of RefWorks?  Well, learners in the Finding Scholarly Articles session loved it so much they filled the room with applause!

If you weren’t at Dallas, you may wonder what all the hoopla is about.  Here are the benefits of RefWorks in a nutshell:

Organizing your Citations

• Quickly export citations from many of the library databases.
• Organize your citations into folders – by paper, course, topic, etc.  You can even put a single citation in several folders.
• Link back to the full text in the library database.
• Add notes to individual references to help you keep track of important information.

Creating Bibliographies

• Automatically create a bibliography in APA style. (You’ll need to proof-read it.)
• Use Write-N-Cite to automatically create in-text citations and reference lists in Word.
• Share a bibliography with others by posting it to a webpage.

For more information about RefWorks, check out our RefWorks Information Page (it’s linked from the library’s Databases A-Z page as well).

-Erin